Charles Yale Harrison, Generals Die in Bed

Nils Clausson (University of Regina)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.1.2: Canadian Writing and Culture (Anglophone): The Twentieth Century and beyond, 1900-present.
Vol. editors: Sarah Henzi (Simon Fraser University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Glen Nichols (Mount Allison University), Wendy Roy (University of Saskatchewan), Denis Salter (McGill University), Karis Shearer (University of British Columbia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1930

Places

United States (Publication/ performance)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Charles Yale Harrison’s novel Generals Die in Bed (1930) is one of large group of novels and memoirs written in the late 1920s and early 1930s by soldiers who had experienced and survived World War I. The novel is narrated, in the present tense, as the experiences of an unnamed private in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, from the time of his enlistment in Montreal in the summer of 1917 until he is wounded at the Battle of Amiens in August 1918, after which he is sent home. Harrison’s portrait of life in the trenches is unrelievedly horrible – rats, lice, blood, disease, decaying bodies. What distinguishes Harrison’s novel from most of the other war novels published around the same time is its absolute disillusionment and …

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3042 words

Citation: Clausson, Nils. "Generals Die in Bed". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 07 July 2011 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=32184, accessed 23 November 2024.]

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